In Conversation: Taylor Reynolds and Dave Harris

Almanac asked director Taylor Reynolds to interview playwright Dave Harris. Their conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

TAYLOR REYNOLDS Playwrights Horizons and Center Theater Group have decided to co-produce Tambo & Bones in the year 2021 — which is dope as hell — so I’m interested in hearing the origin story of Tambo & Bones and all of that. What is the aesthetic of a Dave Harris play?

Let me give you my answer first. I say “Dave Harris play” but also want to fully acknowledge that you are a poet. You are a performer. You’re everything and everything.

I find that, with your work, there’s a consistent questioning of tearing systems down — but working within the system to tear it down — but then becoming part of the system — but then realizing, oh shit, I’m part of the system. It feels very much like being alive in our current moment. I think everybody’s finally realizing that they’re racist as hell — that the systems we are born and raised into are for the most part racist, that racism is born into us, and that there is an unlearning process.

DAVE HARRIS In all my plays, I’m trying to find language for something that scares me. I start with some fear — that’s the heart of each play — and then I ask what’s the most fun way to get to the core of this. Once you have language for something, you gain agency. All my characters have to figure out how to deal with the consequences of their own agency.

TR One of the many things that excites me about Tambo & Bones is that the play makes us question what is really happening onstage, and then it also has the actual playwright admit, onstage, that maybe the audience shouldn’t trust him, or that maybe he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. I think that’s a deeply vulnerable — but also bold — place for a playwright to go: to put yourself on blast in the play itself. It’s certainly freeing as somebody who gets to work on your plays, but I wonder if it feels as freeing for you to put yourself in it?

In all my plays, I’m trying to find language for something that scares me.

DH For me it’s liberating. It makes it possible for a certain kind of internal work to take shape. I feel this way about all art, but I think playwriting especially is so inherently about ego, so inherently capitalistic. And I don't mean that purely in the sense of money but in the sense of: theater artists all create something in order to gain something from the audience. The thing I’m always trying to confront is: what do I want by putting myself here?

Throughout my life, I’ve found myself continually in white spaces, and continually rebelling against white spaces, and continually finding that that rebellion has also led to me gaining in some way. I used to do spoken word poetry, touring and performing in front of these white audiences who are snapping. I’m onstage, doing what I believe is conveying pain, performing authenticity, and these people fucking love me. So because of that, my relationship to the story I was telling gets corrupted. For me, then, the next level of work requires that I dig into what that corruption is. I literally ask myself: what am I doing here besides trying to gain the currency of laughter, or the currency of someone thinking that I’m cool for writing this? Am I putting this up for an audience just because I want an audience? 

Tambo & Bones started from these questions. What do I want by being here? What do I want by telling this story in this space?

TR It’s awesome to hear you dig a little deeper into the play’s relationships with and to whiteness. And it’s not just that we are being held down by specific white people who have enslaved us — it’s also capitalism. The play puts capitalism on blast and I am so intrigued to see what the response will be from Playwrights Horizons audiences. Tambo & Bones is fascinating because it deals with white supremacy intersectionally. Tambo and Bones have different ideas of how to sell themselves to get to the top of the game. Finally, they get what they want, but they never really get what they want.

I’m wondering: what are Tambo and Bones' utopian visions of the world? And what is Dave Harris’s utopia? We’ve talked privately about burning the world down, getting rid of white people, destroying the systems. But what happens after we destroy everything? What does rebuilding look like?

DH When the most recent slate of publicity came out around white violence, and white people murdering black people, I spent a long time trying to figure out whether I was feeling anything new. Was it grief? Was I bored? Was I galvanized? In one sense, it was anger — you know, to be Black and to be conscious is to be angry all the time. Like, yes, real, AND also there’s a certain point when that form of anger stops feeling useful because it’s repetitive. 

I went back and reread a lot of old black literary criticism and a lot of old black plays that should have been canonized. It gave me this feeling that none of this is new — none of the conversations in theater around criticism, or representation, or what we want to say in front of white people, or what we don’t want to say, or what space or whose space. All these things are so storied and so repetitive in a way that made me feel very sad. We’re still having the exact same conversations.

But I also realized, too, that none of this is special — and I don’t mean that in a diminutive sense. I mean, we’ve gone through this over and over again, so who am I to think I’m experiencing something revolutionary? If everything is repeated in one way or another, and we haven’t actually grown in the past 400 years, or the past thousand years, then what should we strive for?

We’ve talked privately about burning the world down, getting rid of white people, destroying the systems. But what happens after we destroy everything? What does rebuilding look like?

This is why the third act of Tambo & Bones took so many forms — there are a lot of different drafts of that part. I had to keep reckoning with what it meant to push toward some idea of “better,” knowing that that idea of “better” probably looks exactly the same as it does now. I kept wondering, have I failed to do the imaginative work of envisioning, of creating an idea of “better” and orienting myself towards that? I don't think that’s true, but I had to let that possibility lie. Whatever future I imagine, it’s one where people would feel much safer and more secure. Where my mother feels safe. Where my friends feel safe. Where I feel safe because they feel safe. At the same time, I think the emotional reality of living in that situation would be very similar to what it is now — which scares me but also makes me feel connected to everything that came before.

TR I’m thinking about the idea of the future and the idea of true systemic change in society — dealing with racism and transphobia and misogyny. It takes a long time. Unlearning is generational unlearning. It takes time to heal and process intergenerational trauma. My wildest dream is for us not to have intergenerational trauma.

I think the path forward is, perhaps, based in sacrifice. You know, releasing some of your privilege so that a POC person can step into a leadership role. That’s difficult because people feel like they’re losing something

DH I'm wondering if sacrifice feels like it's a part of your art.

TR What a great question. Totally. Being a theater artist is just inherently difficult and problematic, because the systems that exist in theaters are so broken. We should stop using them and figure something else out — and if people don’t like working collaboratively, then I don’t know where you go, but you can’t be in my theater.

As an artist, the way I operate is so collaborative, and everybody is so dependent on each other. At The Movement, the five of us do everything non-hierarchically. I bring in collaborators who want to have a voice, who want to serve the play, and who have strong dramaturgical thoughts — because the shit that I like to work on is insane. I need multiple actors and a full design team and a playwright in the room all the time. I like works that are impossible to know what to do with, that require multiple people trying to figure it out — and by the end of the run, maybe we’ve gotten seventy-five percent of the way there. To me, that’s what makes it worth it — working on the challenge and the impossibility of it.

DH I'm still thinking about utopia and the future, and about cost and sacrifice, and how all of that affects existing in this industry and in this country. It’s probably all the same conversation. But this is why I think capitalism is so hard, so internalized, and so impossible to root out. How do we imagine processes that cost us less? Each cost does, in some way, have its own reward. For example, the ways I learned to excel within white spaces cost me something, in the sense that this norm replaced an old norm. But the reward was the safety afforded by those spaces. The cost of that came with the reward of being able to exist in the space I decided I wanted to exist in.

TR The costs. The costs to speak, the costs to say things, and the costs to receive responses from predominantly white institutions. I love the predominantly white people working there — I have really positive and supported relationships with them. But feeling comfortable in a predominantly white space and feeling comfortable in an organization run by people of color are just different experiences. It’s not like code switching, because it’s not that conscious. With PWIs, in the back of my mind, there’s a little part of me that says, just be aware, watch what you say. Because you never know. Maybe you’ll get a little too comfortable. Maybe they won’t be able to relate to you because you’re a Black woman sitting in front of them instead of just Taylor.

What is your vibe about PWIs? What’s it like trying to pitch your work to PWIs? What’s your hot take in this time where POC-led initiatives are releasing lists of demands?

DH My hot take probably isn’t that hot. I didn’t read all the demands because I was tired and I can guess. And this was coming off being deep in two theater-related coups that resulted in problematic white leaders being removed. If I read it, I’m sure I would agree with most of it. But also, white supremacy is such an easy target. I don’t mean to discredit the work we have to do to tear it down. I just haven’t been surprised by a white person in a really long time. It’s so rare something that feels new or surprising happens on that level.

My wildest dream is for us not to have intergenerational trauma.

I think there might be more interesting conversations that white supremacy distracts from — and I want to help create more spaces where those conversations could happen. I’m more interested in the internal conversations and lineages of dissent within Blackness. Tambo & Bones came from the idea that there’s no way for me to divorce theater and capitalism. I can sign a list of demands and I can still want to be in this space because we’re doing this show. Those things co-exist.

The conversations I’ve found the most enlightening are those that reckon with the cost of writing. Writing has a cost — and people will love you for paying it. I could write the most boring play about police brutality, and someone would do it and love it — so it would have done something, but it also would have brought me acclaim as a writer. I can’t divorce those impulses from one another. So in this search for newness, in all this language and fear, what’s the cost that I’m paying in the work of each of my plays? And how will I contend with the reward?

TR Right. The work costs something, and I think being willing to give that something — whatever it is, emotionally, physically, mentally — is part of the sacrifice. Just to do that much is hard and takes skill. And then, on top of that, to address these insanely unsolvable issues that exist within global societies and now a pandemic is just — this is why I can’t send emails. You know? I woke up and that’s enough.

Photo of Taylor Reynolds and Dave Harris by Zack DeZon.